Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur
The expectations are that the 18th Amendment will prove most effective against military takeovers. However, it may not live up to its billing unless someone decides to test its patency and potency
The other day I had to leave very early for Karachi. I never use alarms and depend on habits acquired during the years of the struggle to wake up when need be and have never been late. Our house that was built in 1920 has a reasonably sized lawn and indigenous birds are regular visitors.
I was awoken by the shrill calls of a cuckoo, as cuckoos give their calls at dawn and a little later I thought that my instincts were losing touch and I was late. The watch showed 4 am, an unusual time for them to start coo-cooing. I was not exactly upset at being woken earlier but the birds’ behaviour seemed odd and I thought that probably Aves (birds) — the ancestors of Archaeopteryx lithographical from the Tithonian stage of the Late Jurassic age some 150-145 million years ago — too are going cuckoo like us human beings.
I know my contention about all human beings being a little crazy will be disputed but I have always believed that crazy we all are, it is only a matter of how much. When I used to teach the Baloch refugees in Afghanistan and also looked after their minor medical needs, whenever a little crazier than usual person would come there for medicine, some students would find holding back their laughter difficult; I always told them we all are crazy and it is just a matter of degrees.
Ah, this ‘D’ word! It is the most talked about thing these days. Many believe that phony degrees-possessing representatives of the august body of parliament should be strung from the nearest pole in the way Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were. Their apologists abound and even the Federal Minister for Education, Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali, said: “The compensation of some crime should be equal to the nature of that crime and the same applies to the case of fake degrees where the public representatives should not be sent back home merely on the basis of this small mistake.” He thinks pursuing the matter would destabilise democracy.
Deceptions by those with the responsibility to decide the fate of the hapless people is a cardinal sin and should not happen, but a hefty percentage of them are guilty. And their apologists say that because the people elected them they should not be punished. Sadly, here deception is universally practiced and has become socially acceptable behaviour; many multiple-Hajj intending pilgrims without compunction claim that they have never performed Hajj before. Though this act destroys the very essence of the entire exercise, yet it is committed nonchalantly. Unfortunately, no one stops either them or the parliamentarians from committing this ‘small mistake’. In fact, the people around them abet them and now for its own interests the entire state machinery is busy finding ways to justify this phony degree issue. Naturally, if ends justify the means then the politicians will remorselessly do whatever they want.
With people committing suicides to escape poverty one would need the skin of a rhinoceros to have a 25,000 euro meal in Brussels as Gilani, the prime minister of Pakistan, did. This too when a recent report on food insecurity states that “61 percent — 80 out of 137 — districts are food insecure in Pakistan and AJK, bringing the percentage of food insecure population in the country to 48.6 percent, i.e. more than 80 million people.” How on earth could anyone justify such extravagance? But maybe this too is regarded as a small mistake.
Two French Junior Ministers, Alain Joyandet and Christian Blanc resigned recently. Joyandet after he chartered a private jet for 116,500 euros to attend a meeting in Martinique, while Blanc bought 12,000 euros worth of Havana cigars with the taxpayers’ money. Over here our law minister, Babar Awan, won the government’s accolades for chartering a plane to dole out precious money to buy the loyalties of some lawyers. One lawyer, Yasin, however declined his Rs 50,000 gift.The 18th Amendment too is contentious and is being debated. The amendment’s supporters claim that it has closed the doors on military takeovers forever. However, its detractors think this is preposterous because if the original 1973 Constitution could not stop military takeovers, how on earth can this amendment do it.
Alice Lakwena, a voodoo priestess during the 1980s civil war in Uganda, led the Holy Spirit Movement and became the most troublesome of several insurgencies fighting President Yoweri Museveni. She inspired thousands of Ugandan rebels to march into battle singing hymns, their bare chests smeared with oil from Shea trees used in the manufacture of shampoo — they believed it would ward off bullets. She armed them with sticks and stones, saying they would explode like grenades during battle. Alice also passed out sachets of powder ground from squirrel bones, promising these would make them invisible to the enemy. Naturally, the result was a fearsome slaughter in battle. Some 6,000 Ugandans died fighting for her. She claimed she would resurrect after parting the River Nile and taking over Kampala. She was captured in Kenya in 1987 while trying to flee.
The expectations are that the 18th Amendment will prove most effective against military takeovers. However, it may not live up to its billing unless someone decides to test its patency and potency. The oil of the 18th Amendment smeared on the constitution may not be enough to ward off the designs of a determined person. Events of great import have always remained mysteriously inexplicable and this situation will not change. Three years ago if an oracle had predicted that Asif Ali Zardari would be the president, he would have been ridiculed to death. So never underestimate the potential of the cuckoo land to spring surprises when you least expect them.
By the way, cuckoos are brood parasites and they too commit ‘small mistakes’. They lay their eggs in the nests of other species of birds and often just drop the eggs already there to replace them with theirs. The unwitting host bird, thinking the hatchling is one of its own, feeds the intruder bird with its own brood. Some cuckoos here in the past have just brushed away the eggs of ‘heavy mandate’ and replaced them with an ‘enlightened moderate’ egg. People say times have changed and this cannot happen ever again, but the element of force remains in the same place in the power equation and can be applied if a cuckoo deems it necessary.
Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com |
